Pixie Pool: A Mirage of Deeps and Shadows

I discovered this book via an advertisement. Admittedly, a century-old advertisement. I was looking up some book reviews in the TLS of 30 May 1912, and saw an advertisement for E.G. Swain's Stoneground Ghost Tales (1912), published by W. Heffer & Sons of Cambridge. I already knew and liked Swain's book, so I was intrigued as well by the other book being advertised along with it: Pixie Pool (1911) by Edmund Vale. The blurbs note it as having "beautiful myths" and of having "the same kind of imagination that we find in parts of Algernon Blackwood's Education of Uncle Paul."  Yes, the advertising worked, albeit over one hundred years too late to benefit the publisher, and I set out to find a copy. Easier said than done, but eventually I did procure one.

Pixie Pool: A Mirage of Deeps and Shadows is a collection of eighteen items, plus a short preface by the author. The first and final pieces are poems, but the sixteen items in between are stories.  The book has eight illustrations in inserted plates by one E.R. Herrmann, about whom I can find almost nothing. The illustrations are not especially inspired. 

The presentation of the book (the cover and the illustrations) suggest a bit of twee-ness, but fortunately this is not the case for the tales. "The Master Musician" lives alone and teaches the trees and waters to sing, but he is abducted and taken to entertain the King, and imprisoned when he won't. The Musician strikes a deal with the King whereby he will sing his last song one moonlit night, and thereby he escapes. In "The Last Arrow," an arrow dropped by cupid into a forest grows into a flower of a new and unknown color. The bloom is plucked by a wandering stranger; but the nightingale, having seen the color, and has learned to sing of it. In "The Blue Wave," the cloud and the wind have had five daughters, all waves. One is blue, who is determined that she will love only a human skeleton.  Olemel, in "The Sky Lovers," transforms into a sunbeam in order to wed the Child of the Morning Wave. Complications ensue, but the lovers are aided in reuniting by various insects and animals. One tale is darker than the rest. In "The Shadow," the eponymous character comes to a feast and offers to draw life portraits of everyone, and when he does so all of the portraits show a shadow. Save in one portrait.

In the preface, Vale acknowledges that some (unspecified) materials in the book are reprinted from The Contemporary Review, but no specifics are known. 

Edmund Vale

Edmund Vale was the pen-name of Henry Edmund Theodoric Vale (1888-1969), who was born in Wales and educated at St. John's College, Cambridge. He married Ruth Madeline Hutchings in Dorset in 1924; they had one son and two daughters. He published over two dozen books, most of them nonfiction, on topics from Roc: A Dog's Eye View of War (1930) and The Seas & Shores of England (1936) on to How to Look at Old Buildings (1940), Shropshire (1940) and Abbeys and Priories (1955). The World of Wales (1935) was partially illustrated by his wife. His final book was The Mail-Coach Men of the Late Eighteenth Century (1960). 

In contrast, his first book was a slim book of poetry, Echoes from the Northland (1908), which was followed by Pixie Pool, and then by another collection of poems, Elfin Chaunts and Railway Rhythms (1914).  Pixie Pool is pretty rare, and is not held in the British Library. It is apparently his only published fiction, though in 1927 he had another volume called Tapestry Tales, for which Vale tried without success to get an introduction from John Buchan. The book was never published.

Tales of Mourne

Tales of Mourne (Duckworth, 1937) sounded like an interesting title. I didn't know, at the time I acquired the book, that the Mourne Mountains were a known geographical feature of County Down, in the south-eastern part of Northern Ireland.  But I did know that the Tales concerned the fairies and legends about them. 

When the book arrived I found a surprise: an unsigned frontispiece, of an eccentric and individualistic style.  I later learned that the frontispiece also appears on the dust-wrapper, and that the artist was one Edward Scott-Snell. I subsequently discovered an interesting book on Edward Scott-Snell (later Godwin) and his wife, Stephani, by their son, Joscelyn Godwin, himself a well-known author of books on philosophical, occult, and mystical topics. The art deserves a separate post, so I will say no more now. 

Now to the tales themselves. The book includes fourteen stories, plus one dedicatory poem. The stories are not mere retellings of fairy lore, but new tales which often encompass fairy lore. I found them rather closer to Bernard Sleigh's Gates of Horn (1926) than to folk tales--thus stories of encounters with various fairy-type beings, but without the investigatory framework of Sleigh's collection, though all the tales are set around Mourne. The first story concerns a seal-woman who marries a mortal. Another, "The Ending of a Song," tells of a shepherd who sees a fairy light, and following it, he hears the ending of a song he had been searching for. The longest story in the book, "Fairy's Farm," tells of a man who purchases a farm, with a fairy friend providing the necessary money.  A blood pact is signed between them, and some years later its breaking by the man causes unforeseen results. The frontispiece illustrates a scene from "The Fiddler," in which a man's music comes between  him and his new pious wife. An interesting and varied collection. 

The author's name is given as Richard Rowley, but this was the pseudonym of the poet and playwright Richard Valentine Williams (1877-1947). Tales of Mourne was his only volume of fiction.

Grotesqueries - A Tribute to the Tales of L A Lewis

 

In the past year I have been working with Jonas Ploeger of Zagava Books on an anthology of stories inspired by the visions of Leslie Allin Lewis (1899-1961).

I am fairly certain I encountered Lewis’ work first through the keen advocacy of Richard Dalby, who had discovered these rare and unusual weird tales, and then traced and befriended Lewis’ widow. She gave him important details of Lewis’ troubled life and asked Richard to act as his literary executor.

I eventually found a very tatty and faded copy of his one book, Tales of the Grotesque (1934), which was all the more precious for being in such a well-worn condition, a battered survivor.

His 'The Tower of Moab', about the demon-haunted headquarters of a strange sect, is now recognised as a classic, and it inspired David Tibet’s Current 93 song ‘Lucifer Over London’. I have written elsewhere on this blog about the probable inspiration for the Tower in the edifice erected by the Jezreelites in Gillingham.

But Lewis also wrote other powerful stories, some reflecting his wartime experiences and others his strong sense of other dimensions, cosmic entities and malevolent powers. The original stories in Grotesqueries – A Tribute to TheTales of L A Lewis respond to the full range of his work.

The contributors are: Reggie Oliver, Mark Samuels, Rosalie Parker, Rebecca Lloyd, John Howard, Jane Jakeman, Ron Weighell, D P Watt, R B Russell, Jonathan Wood, Caroline Tyrrell, Colin Insole, and Mark Valentine.

The book will be available in paperback, numbered hardback and very limited artist’s edition. 

(Mark Valentine)

Dancing With Salome - Nina Antonia

Wormwood contributor Nina Antonia earlier explored the life and work of Decadent poet Lionel Johnson, and has now published a book about “the dark magic of the 1890s”. Dancing with Salome – Courting the Uncanny with Oscar Wilde and Friends, is a collection of interlinked essays on Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and the fin-de-siecle period, with a particular focus on the esoteric.

This new publication “unmasks the occult aspects of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, while exploring how the unseen manifested not just in the author’s life but in that of his love interest, Lord Alfred Douglas”. It notes that Aubrey Beardsley would not have Wilde’s books in his rooms because he sensed there was a curse upon them, and investigates the origins of this sense of a doom upon Wilde. The book also discusses the mingling of eroticism and mysticism that pervaded the Decadent movement, and traces the influence of the Order of the Golden Dawn.

 

Wormwood 37

Wormwood 37 has just been announced. This issue includes:

John Howard on the many dimensions of Fritz Leiber

Tom Sparrow on Henry Mercer, author of antiquarian ghost stories

Oliver Kerkdijk on Dutch fantasist Henri van Booven

Colin Insole on the modern ghost stories of Robert Westall

Adrian Eckerseley with a new view of Machen’s The Hill of Dreams

Mark Valentine on the figure of Arthur in the 1970s

In our review columns, Reggie Oliver discusses books where the past haunts the present, and John Howard looks at books with settings ranging from Atlantis to Zurich.